Creator of Yoon-Suin and other materials. Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games. Jotting down and elaborating on ideas for campaigns, missions and adventures. Talking about general industry-related matters. Putting a new twist on gaming.

Sunday, 30 March 2014

Revisiting Localism

A while ago I mused at some length about 'localism' in gaming. To summarise, I think setting games in your local area, or creating settings that are heavily inspired by your local area, allows you an intimacy, familiarity and level of detailed knowledge that can't be matched with a game set in an exotic/historic/mythological place and era, like Athas, the 13th Century Outer Mongolia of Genghis Khan, Ancient Greece, or New Zealand. Certain elements of setting which DMs struggle with (particularly the little intangible things like weather, scenery, geography, and so forth which give a setting a genuine feeling of place and verisimilitude) come ready-made, baked into your own brain.

I moved up to the North East of England about 18 months ago for a work. It's an area of the country I'd never been to before and, to be frank, I'd never had much intention of visiting. If you're not from the North East of England you tend to forget it exists. It's not on the way to anywhere. The cities are small, mostly poor, and isolated from other conurbations by swathes of sparsely populated countryside full of defunct, slowly de-populating former mining villages. Now and again you watch Match of the Day and the highlights of a Newcastle game come on and you might think to yourself, "Oh yeah, Newcastle. That's a city and it exists." But otherwise it doesn't occupy much of a space in the national psyche. Unless you're a fan of brown ale.

Which is a bit of a shame, because this corner of the country (well, Northumberland anyway) has a lot to offer - incredible scenery, beautiful little market towns and picturesque villages, castles by the dozen, Roman ruins, great local cuisine, hidden treasures like Holy Island - and ought to be a complete tourist trap. Though on the other hand, a large part of me quite likes the feeling of living in one of Britain's best-kept secrets.

I do a lot of hiking and today as I was walking around I started thinking about running a game of D&D incorporating the things that are typical elements of the Northumberland countryside. The game wouldn't be set in actual Northumberland, but would be strongly inspired by it - imbued with it. What might these things be?

Sheep. Northumberland is hilly, wild, barren. It's sheep country. In this game of D&D, "orcs" would be gangly sheep-headed humanoids carrying weapons of stone and possessing cruel, ovine eyes with long, horizontal pupils that would remain horribly emotionless as their owner skinned you alive.

Gorse. You see a lot of gorse bushes when out hiking. Impenetrably thick and totally unforgiving: hardy survivors of the plant world. In Northumberland D&D, "goblins" would be little people made of wiry, spiny, bitter, nasty, gorse. Waiting in the scrub motionless for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, for a lonely traveller to come by....

Wind. Northumberland must surely be England's windiest county. It comes barrelling down from the North Sea bringing the Arctic air with it to chill the very land itself right down to its roots. D&D Northumberland is a place of wind spirits - air elementals, sylphs, tempests, etc.

Ghosts. The border between Scotland and England is soaked in blood thanks to century on century of war, border raids, feuds, cattle-rustling and unpunished murder. Northumberland D&D would not have 'Scotland' and 'England' but it would have layer upon layer of violent history - and the ghosts that history had bequeathed.

Clerics. Northumberland is sometimes called the "cradle of Christianity" because it is where Christianity first took root in England. Again, Northumberland D&D wouldn't have 'Christianity' but it would have an overabundance of abbeys, monasteries, shrines and other holy places, full of monks singing strange chants and scratching with ink-and-quill in scrolls and weighty tomes for hour after hour by candlelight. At theme might be the conversion of unbelievers to a revolutionary new religion - or the resistance to it.

If you were going to run a game set in your local region, what characteristics would it have?

23 comments:

I am from Galicia, northwestern Spain. Quite like in England, it rains a lot, so much that the Moors never stayed here. They just made raids. I guess they should be part of the setting, on that role of marauders, killing your family and stealing your cattle. Even though Galicia is and was Christian, there's a tendency to venerate Saints, instead of Jesus or the Virgin Mary directly. I imagine that should come into consideration for clerical orders or spells.Same as you proposed air elementals, I think that water elementals should be omnipresent. Ondines, mermaids and stuff. Maybe, wizards need to be part water elemental, as meigas (witches) were sometimes supposed to be.

TSR Marvel Super Heroes used to encourage campaigns to be set locally. I'm trying to imagine a fantasy campaign based on inner suburban Sydney, famous for it's high density housing, shocking public transport and middle class whingers...hmmm, maybe not...:)

Eastern Oklahoma is a woody, hilly location. Lots of pine forests and hollows. Little townships sitting mostly forgotten by everyone but their inhabitants. So Isolated villages, strange folk who do not approve of outsiders.

Pine Forest, Poison Ivy, Poison Oak, Poison Sumac, Poison... you get the idea: Sinister Dryads claim the forests, their foul offspring in the form of shambling mounds reaching with corrupting, writhing tendrils.

Native Peoples, displaced and local: The Oklahoma Territories were a dumping ground for displaced Native Americans, as well as hosting its own local tribes. We eventually kicked them out over the Land Run (not entirely accurate, close enough for government work, though). So themes of clashing peoples, settlements of folk pressed away from civilization. Also, the 'oppressors' fleeing an overpopulated and decadent home territory to try and forge new ways.

Daniel, I'm from Eastern Oklahoma as well. I think the Native connection is an untapped reservoir of potential. You have the st'gini, the Deer Woman, Medicine, Skinwalkers, etc...not to mention the threat of uprising or those 'civilized' people abusing the natives and causing an uprising.

I think the burgeoning meth business also lends itself to some good role-playing opportunities. There are also plenty of deer, black bear, the rare mountain lion...all of that could be used.

My dad was a fishery biologist for years and every summer he would get calls from people boating on Lake Eufala about monstrous catfish attacking them. That has some potential.

I love the idea of using the runestoneWe should get together and game sometime. I live in McAlester.

South-Western Norway. With the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean to our west, mountains and rocky hills to the north, east and south, cut by fjords and valleys. In the centre there are islands, a fertile plain and the booming petrolium-city Stavanger.

In a D&D-esque Rogaland the centre-piece would be a newly rich arrogant city founded by wealth extracted by the hard and dangerous labour of others - probably dungeon delvers and adventurers who dare enter the mountains. Also they are vikings, I guess. So part goldmining-town, part Port Royal with vikings.

The plain-dwellers and sheepherders of the southern hills would be deeply puritan and pious, highly suspicious of strangers, priest-ridden and prone to banditry. In the mountain poor isolated villages have long found a balance between humanity and the trolls, giants and other factions in the mountains, often leading hapless adventurers to their deaths as a toll on their continued safety.

In the highland plateus, marvelous cities of gold are ruled by giants, the subterranean races (Norwegian faeries) hoard their wealth eked out from the deeps, and seek to steal the most handsome men in the area. Nomadic orcs ready themselves to raid the humans in the lowlands, the farmers, led by the priests seek to rise against against the pagan cityfolk, the cityfolk tries to exploit everyone within reach.

This quickly became a mix between historical conflicts and local faerie tales. It could work as a campaign, I think.

I've run The Gamma World adventures in real world job and university sites. It makes it easy to visualize steam tunnels (Tom hanks Mazes and Monsters freakout!), you've always got handy maps around, and you get to portray your boss as a hideous mutant.

Lately when I hike, I've contemplated running an Ohio territory game, an earlier version of a musket-era Boot Hill when the woods were still full of indians, Frenchmen mucking about, and the Ohio valley was a frontier. A world filled with the Wendigo kidnapping children, Chippewa warriors contending with the Algonquin, and the oddity of a Lovecraftian community of witches, who'd fled the fires of Massachusetts for the wilderness of the western reserve.

As I walk on the towpath trail I think of a later era, of the old tales of the drunken canal towns and of the bloody massacre at Gnadenhutton. I think of the River pirates like the Harpe brothers, the Jim Wilson Family, or the Mason Gang. The possibility of the old magic of the serpent mound mixing with the newly minted religions of the frontier. Even some possibilities for a Cthulu or Boot Hill game based around Mad John Brown and escaped slaves, still reeking of the Congo.

Then there is my idea for hideous inbred mutants, who creep from the old mill towns, the result of 19th century chemical spills and deals with the devils, waylaying those who stray off the interstates.

Connecticut is assumed to be just rich people (and it's got a bit of that), but once you get out of the I-95 Corridor it evaporates into Old-Timey New English wilderness pretty quick. It's actually more densely forested today than it was 200 years ago, since most agriculture has been abandoned here. We have coyotes and deer and all sorts of things, and I'm about 50 minutes from Manhattan.

I have thought often of a "Silk Road" - style game, where a series of forts and trading towns leading between two major City States (New York and Boston, obviously) keep the wilds at bay. But instead of nomadic horsemen and icy steppes, it's goblins and entish tree things that are constantly beating at the "civilized" fortress-nations. there are whole abandoned law-aligned colonies deep in the "chaos woods," just waiting to be rediscovered, and this is all just a few hours walk from town. Perfect for dungeon-delving.

Sacramento lays in the middle of a vast dry valley at the confluence of two partly seasonal rivers, with mountain ranges to the east and west.

Sacramento is rightly associated with the 1849 gold rush, which gets much more interesting when you add in monsters, Sutter's fort becoming a real fortress, and dwarves living under the foothills and resisting those that would grub for gold therein.

The dry foothills in the summer are rightly creepy already, and the deathly stillness of a 100 degree day plus the danger of desicated undead mule deer-men and angry dwarves laying in ambush seems pretty evocative to me. Real life dangers like grizzley bears, wolves, and cougers are a nice bonus.

The real natives of the region were primative hunter/gatherers easily displaced, but horse riding elves living to the north, and launching raids on the fortress add in more danger.

The spanish missions creeping up the coast can instead be colonies of a rival nation, which gives a political angle to the whole operation, and San Francisico can be the burgeoning "big town" you go to get the more esoteric supplies.